Jarrett Walker's personal notes on places, arts, plants, and the search for home.

2009.04.17

space

Sydney

When I first imagined moving to Australia, it was about space. Everything felt spacious here. The bracing void of the continent seemed to promise more room in all dimensions, not just between cities but between moments, between thoughts, even between walls.

But metaphors have half-lives, and as they decay the raw becomes rawer. On my first flight across the continent, I set myself a task. I would fix my eye on the patch of red land below me, framed like a picture in the airplane window. I'd take this picture as an object of meditation, follow my breath, and commit to remaining with it until something about it changed.

I could never do it. Perhaps the picture in the window would be scalloped pink dunes, stretching across the picture frame, rolling slowly to the left with always a new identical dune rolling in from the right. I'd watch as hundreds passed, waiting for the variation. Something. I didn't need a road, a town. A tree would have done, or even just a shift in the pattern of dunes, a spare beat in the rhythm. Nothing. The land did change, but at a pace below human perception.

Comments

Whenever I fly I always ask for a window seat in order to be able to watch the unfolding landscape below. Oftentimes this desire is thwarted by a helpful check-in clerk giving me an exit-aisle window seat over the wing, and on other journeys the unfolding landscape turns out to be blanketed entirely in cloud. But when none of these disappointments occur, I'll happily stare out the window for hours watching the slowly transforming landscape. Inland Australia, in particular, is a fascinating study, the long lines of dunes stretching to the horizon, the glistening pans of salt lakes, and the abstract patternings of bushfires, so I've never found it boring. However, on reading this post, I'm reminded once again that this is not a shared view.

A similar meditation, with an even slower rhythym, is to watch the vegetation as one drives across the continent. Not the exciting bits on the edge, or the settled areas with their pattern reduced to the human artefacts of fence and field, but the vast flat interior. Make a mental note of the landscape, a verbal description of it for yourself perhaps to focus the eye, and then watch it and it's amazing how it will imperceptibly shift into something else, white dunes gradually morphing through salmon to orange to red, or chenopod shrublands thinning out little by little until all around is nothing but barren gibber plains of polished red stone, utterly transformed but without any obvious point marking the transition.

Chenopod - that's a word. What staggers me is how indigenous painters show what we horizontalists couldn't even imagine till we got flight; how their vision is so aerial, so spatial, so above, in more ways than one.

I really love to travel in flight. Specially i always take window side seat so that i am able to watch flight landing and take off. Last time when i went to paris, I really enjoyed my journey. It was very cheap as i got my ticket thru LMT because of some deal.